Grand Rapids officer illegally puts men out of business

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Michael

Anthony and Willie Mills opened up a restaurant in Grand Rapids. It wasn’t much of a place, but it was making them enough money to stay open, give them some autonomy, and do a little to help out the local economy. But then an unnamed officer came in one night, made erroneous claims, and shut the whole operation down.

Here are two brothers who came and tried to open up a legitimate business. They weren’t in violation of the law. There wasn’t criminal activity going on in the business. They were just doing the best they could here in Michigan and because of what happened they have lost that dream. They have lost that opportunity to succeed,” said Benjamin Mills, a partner at Gruel, Mills, Nims & Pyleman who is now representing Anthony and Willie Mills.

The Mills brothers opened the now vacant restaurant called Chili Willi’s on Eastern and Burton 5 months ago. They say the new business was just making enough money to keep the doors open then on August 30th a Grand Rapids police officer came in and improperly shut them down for not having a license they in fact did not need.

“He closed me up and told me if I sold anything that I would go to jail,” said co-owner Willie Mills.

After this story first got press, the city looked into what was going on. They’ve admitted guilt.

After losing their business the Mills brothers needed to know why this happened to them and wanted someone to be held accountable. They contacted 13 On Your Side and we went to police and city leaders to get some answers.

“Well after your story it brought this whole thing to our attention. We realized a mistake had happened. We are not out trying to hurt any type of business,” said Lt. Ralph Mason, Spokesperson for Grand Rapids Police Department. “A mistake happened. We are humans. We now have to figure out how to get this thing behind us.”

First, a police officer should know better than to admit error publicly. It’s just as bad as a citizen talking to the cops. I suspect if the city is sued, Mason’s statements will be thrown back in his face. In all likelihood, by admitting his guilt he just forced a settlement by the city (which should be at least $25,000, the amount the Mills brothers are out). Second, really? He wants to “figure out how to get this thing behind” the city and police department? How about he gets the Mills brothers back in front of all their debt? That would be the decent thing to do, at least.

Filed under: News | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Thank goodness for Andre Sougarret

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Michael

Andre Sougarret is the engineer called upon by Chilean president Sebastián Piñera to save those 33 miners. It is his heroic efforts and the efforts of those he directed that deserve praise.

The mission was unprecedented. No one had ever drilled so far to reach trapped miners. No one knew where to find them.

From the first confusing days to this week’s glorious finale, the 46-year-old Sougarret was the man with the answers.

Sougarret’s management of the crisis was so successful that nearly all the rescued miners walked out of the hospital yesterday perfectly healthy.

People have been blindly and stupidly thanking their particular god for the saving of these miners. Even the miners themselves held on to their faith, disregarding the grandeur of human action that took place. One miner, Jimmy Sanchez, said this:

There weren’t thirty-three miners down there, there were actually thirty-four of us, because God has never left us down here.

This ought to force us to ask, what about all the other miners who have died this year? And why did more miners in the past die than they do today? What is it that people like Sanchez believe God has a grand plan that is infallible, yet if they pray and have faith, they can alter that plan? Or, why the hell don’t mooks like Sanchez and everyone else with blind faith recognize that they’re gaming the system? No matter what happens, good or bad, it’s all going to be chalked up to somehow being part of God’s plan. I’d say there’s a massive quantity of intellectual dishonesty going on here but 1) faith blinds people to rationality and 2) most of these people probably aren’t curious enough to consider these basic problems with what they believe; bringing intellect into the equations seems a rather moot point.

Drilling through would risk provoking another collapse, crushing anything below.

So, an entirely new shaft would have to be drilled to try to reach the men. And they needed to call in more expertise: the miners who had narrowly escaped being crushed in the Aug. 5 collapse.

It was this recruitment of expertise and knowledge combined with modern technology that saved these 33 lives. If these miners were trapped 150 years ago, they would be dead. There’s no good way to fit a god into this radical difference in outcome: people are more knowledgeable and have better technology than in the past; that raises the odds of being saved.

Thank goodness for Andre Sougarret.

Filed under: News | Tagged: , , | 11 Comments »

Heavyweight galaxy cluster

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Michael

Astronomers have discovered a massive cluster of galaxies in the early Universe.

The most massive conglomeration of galaxies ever spotted in the early universe has been found, astronomers say.

This behemoth galaxy cluster contains about 800 trillion suns packed inside hundreds of galaxies. And it’s not even finished growing.

The newfound cluster, called SPT-CL J0546-5345, is about 7 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that its light has taken that long to reach us. Thus, astronomers are seeing this clump as it was 7 billion years ago.

By now, it likely will have quadrupled in size, researchers said.

How one can imagine there is no life dancing amongst those 800 trillion (and by now, 3200 trillion) stars is beyond me.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

How to make religion and science fit

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Michael

via Jesus and Mo.

Filed under: Humor | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Thought of the day

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Michael

It’s often thrown at atheists that atheism offers no ultimate purpose for living. Aside from pretending that this somehow discredits all the purpose we actually have, this argument forgets one thing: just because the theist has faith that he has an ultimate purpose for living, it does not mean he actually has that ultimate purpose. The point is merely an entirely unpersuasive Argument from Consequence.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 7 Comments »

He doesn’t get atheism either

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

It’s annoying enough when Christopher Maloney wades in over his head and pretends to know something about medicine beyond what a pre-med student might know. But it’s even more annoying when he goes after atheists. (And, I mean, does he really want to go down that road, what with yet offering a viable defense for his quackery?)

I’m constantly amazed that the spokespeople for religious points of view aren’t better at getting their points across. The atheists are the one group who could have picked their spokespeople logically and by open election, but they let the most grumpy of their brethren carry the flag. Here’s a comparison of Dawkins vs. Gervais. If Gervais were the spokesperson for atheism, there would be a lot more converts. He makes his point, and you can’t help liking him for it. Dawkins makes a clever (rehearsed- he gives the same mocking answer to others as well) response without engaging the speaker.

Here’s Richard Dawkins not answering a question. Or answering it, if answering with the same question is an answer.

He then links to this video of Dawkins where an audience member asks what happens if he’s wrong about the Christian god. Dawkins replies by asking the audience member what if she’s wrong about all the other gods. To Maloney, this isn’t answering the question.

Is Dawkins’ point really that hard to get? He’s saying that the only reason that question seems reasonable to the audience member is that she has been brought up in a Christian culture. His question about what it means if she’s wrong about Zeus or Thor or whoever is to show that it doesn’t matter about what god we want to ask the question. It’s a trivial issue that assumes a lot of culture with it. So what if he’s wrong about the Christian god? Then he goes to hell, to the glee of a so-called benevolent creator. And if the audience member is wrong about Allah, she can kiss heaven goodbye. Who cares? The whole question is just a rudimentary way of posing Pascal’s Wager, that piece of philosophical trash.

Oh, and I love how Maloney links back to religion and atheism, as if we need his help in defining the terms. (Well, maybe he needs some help in defining “atheism”.) And linking to the IMDb page for Dawkins? Gold. I love when the elderly use the Internet.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Leonard Mlodinow destroys Deepak Chopra

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

I love this video. Deepak Chopra, one of the biggest charlatans in the world, gets smacked around with incredible ease by Leonard Mlodinow, co-author of The Grand Design.

Filed under: Humor | Tagged: , | 13 Comments »

I can’t believe Maloney is still lying

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

I was searching for PZ Myers YouTube videos but moments ago when I came across this magnificent piece of garbage from Christopher Maloney.

Let’s start from the top:

Maloney did collaborate with Andreas Moritz. Maloney can keep claiming that PZ retracted this or that, but the fact of the matter is this is what PZ actually said:

However, at the very least, Maloney was used as a pretext to shut down the blog. WordPress sent Hawkins email demanding changes to his posts, specifically this one:

[Email from WordPress]

…Someone targeted Hawkins, and sent a demand to WordPress to shut him down. This is someone in communication with Maloney, because Maloney just sent me this email:

And he goes on to quote an email in which Maloney admits to being in contact with Moritz. There is no doubt that these two acted together to report me to WordPress; does anyone believe Maloney didn’t know what Moritz was doing? does anyone believe Maloney didn’t tell Moritz exactly what to send to WordPress? does anyone believe anything Maloney says?

Next Maloney claims my original letter about him has since been pulled from the Kennebec Journal, as if to suggest the paper saw how dastardly it was and just had to remove it! In fact, the KJ remodeled its website shortly after my letter was published – no letter from that period can be found. As evidence for my point, take a look at my response to a couple letters others wrote in response to what I wrote. Now try to follow the links to those letters back to the KJ’s website. (Let me know how that works out for you, Maloney.)

Maloney then goes on to claim he’s just a poor victim who is being harassed by the big mean mob. In fact, since destroying his web presence for getting my blog shut down with the help of Moritz, all the posts about him have been responses. I’ve often said he can’t make things better, he can only not make them worse. Apparently I was being too subtle: stop trying to promote your quackery and everyone will stop ‘harassing’ you. You, Maloney, make things worse by creating elaborate responses months after the fact – case-in-point, this YouTube video.

Next Maloney, for some bizarre reason, tries to say what atheists oppose: authoritarianism. It’s perplexing because atheism is not a philosophy, not an indicator of how to act (or how one will act), and it isn’t a normative position. Atheism is a position that says, for whatever reason, theism is not worth holding. Even then it is necessary to qualify that this only means it is not worth holding for that particular atheist. Many atheists are pro-theism and see it as a positive in the world; they just reject what they see as being positive as also being true. Of course, many atheists do happen to reject that theism is positive (mostly because arriving at atheism is generally for rational people and it’s only rational to see theism as a propagator of evil) but that does not mean that it is possible to know what positions an atheist holds by virtue of knowing he is an atheist. As usual, Maloney is out of his league.

After some rambling Maloney tries to bumble his way out of being called a quack by saying what he does doesn’t fit into the etymology of the word. Feel free to skip over that part of the video. He’s a quack because he practices a form of medicine for which there is no convincing evidence.

Weird that continued attempts to reestablish himself and promote his quackery have resulted in yet another blog post, huh?

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Thought of the day

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

I’m still waiting for even a shred of evidence for God.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Vote Eliot Cutler

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

Eliot Cutler is the most reasonable choice for Maine governor. He’s the one who has a commanding grasp of all the issues, the one with the most reasonable plans, and the one who isn’t going to mess everything up (that honor would be LePage’s). Libby Mitchell would be a fine choice as well, but Cutler has her beat in a number of issues, especially where it comes to being independent of a political system.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »